Proudly the Opposite of What Passes for Progressive

Monthly Archives: April 2016

There is this romantic notion in Canada and the US about indigenous peoples that has been perpetuated by that great disseminator of academic thought and historic accuracy, Hollywood. The Indian Brave is;

…peaceful, kills only to eat or to defend his family, and is not wasteful. The Brave is a spiritual, mystic guardian of the land who exists in harmony with, and as icon of America’s wilderness past, as if he were an eagle or a buffalo rather than human. He is often represented in picturesque nature, showcasing some “natural” skill admired for its primitive purity, like hunting buffalo or riding a horse. The Brave imagery usually includes excessive traditional dress (especially a splendid headdress), thereby reinforcing his flawless naturalness. As a mythic icon of the past, the Brave lacks humanity. Consequentially, the Brave is always shown as stoic, lacking any real emotion, especially humor. This section also includes imagery that romanticizes the traditional Native lifestyle since it is often a key part of Brave depictions.

The romantic notion that indigenous North American peoples were somehow pure and noble and had a culture on par with western cultures is killing people, not metaphorically, but literally. This misrepresentation and cultural relativism is now killing modern natives across Canada.

Cultural relativism is one of the key stones of the progressive left’s belief system and it is defined as such;

Cultural relativism is the principle of regarding the beliefs, values, and practices of a culture from the viewpoint of that culture itself. … In sociology, the principle is sometimes practiced to avoid cultural bias in research, as well as to avoid judging another culture by the standards of one’s own culture. For this reason, cultural relativism has been considered an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism. Cultural relativism is related to but often distinguished from moral relativism, the view that morality is relative to a standard, especially a cultural standard.

The bolding of words is mine.

So, when little Makayla Sault dies because her parents elected to use “traditional” treatments for her leukemia, instead of western medical treatments, what happens? We’re so cowed by political correctness, so flushed with the romantic notion of the noble Brave, so unwilling to break the 11th Commandment (Thou Shalt Not Judge) and declare these “traditional” treatments to be a load of bullshit, we do nothing and stand by while the little girl dies. One needs only go on Google and does a short five minute search to find all sorts of other similar tragic stories.

Oh, but wait. Here’s a hippie couple equally as evil, negligent and pie-in-the-sky retarded and they’re on trial (and rightly so). What’s the difference here? Race perhaps? As one commenter in the Lethbridge Herald article so aptly puts it:

“Children have a right to evidence-based medical care, not just prayer and useless folk remedies.”

Whoa, whoa. Apparently, Makayla Sault didn’t have that right. Because we’re in fact the worst opposite of being racist, we’re deferential. So when native leaders scream in the wake of the suicides in Attawapiskat, the shootings in La Loche, that these and other tragedies are the results of racism in Canada, it’s just the opposite. Canada has given natives plenty of sovereignty, plenty of cultural protections (to the point of promoting it as actually being Canadian culture), and most of all plenty, plenty of cash, to the tune of billions a year. According to the Calgary Herald:

…in 2013/14, Health Canada spent almost $1.1 billion on supplementary benefits such as dental care, vision care and pharmaceutical drugs for eligible First Nations and Inuit Canadians. That coverage is not required by treaties or by the Constitution. And most other Canadians must spend out-of-pocket or buy insurance for such items.

Something is not working with how we’ve approached natives in Canada and we’ve let the left and their insistence on cultural relativism dominate the discussion. When I see TV clips of Attawapiskat, I see a shit hole in the middle of nowhere, with dirt roads and run down modular houses that have boarded up windows, but teenage girls hanging around wearing tight designer jeans. I see boys wearing baseball caps with NBA logos. I see satellite dishes on every home. Jonathan Kay wrote a fantastic article that pointed out, sadly, the following:

Generations ago, aboriginal men in this part of Canada would hunt seal or caribou and come back from the hunt as celebrated providers. But the old skills required to live off the land are either dead or dying — and they’re unnecessary to modern life, in any event. On a tour of Attawapiskat with a former First Nations chief I learned that local homeowners lacked even the basic skills to keep up a pre-fab home, which is why the government has to keep replacing the buildings.

So they want to live in the middle of nowhere, as part of their cultural authenticity, but don’t even have the skills to practice their culture as they romantically remember it.

At some point, some politician has to risk getting labelled as a racist, has to brave the storm of political correctness and just say that enough is enough. You are either participants in our modern society or you are not. The left’s insistence in letting native leaders, willfully blind to the erosion of their backwards cultures in the face of modernity, sequester their own people into remote places, places without hope, all in the name of preserving some romantic notion about a proud people living off the land is killing them. The left are the true racists here.

But it does beggar the question why the NDP feels the need to commit hari-kari on the altar of ludicrous faux-marxist, climate-fascist ideals. And why are so many people, young people especially, turning to the discredited ideas of socialism, pulling old tired tropes off of the scrap heap of history? From the NDP in Canada taking itself to the brink of adopting the Leap Manifesto, to Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn leading the labour party in the U.K., we see socialism becoming more and more popular at the same time that far right movements are gaining steam in Europe, and a nativist movement in the form of Donald Trump’s candidacy having a legitimate political impact in the U.S. This is frightening, because the far right and the far left often find themselves having an incredible amount of common ground in their pursuit of some mythical “purity”, either of race, culture or ideology and their willingness to adopt authoritarian means to achieve that purity.

“Jeremy Corbyn was born in 1949. Stalin was still in power then. Since then we have been through the Korean War, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, the Prague Spring and its subsequent repression, the Communist takeover of Viet Nam and Laos, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, the fall of Eastern European Communism, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen Square and the recent upswing in Russian revanchism. We have also seen free markets and the rule of Law lift billions out of utter destitution, leaving mainly untouched those areas where the Left still has sway. Despite all this, Corbyn still cleaves to the most disgusting, barbarous ideology that has been seen on Earth since the Conquistadors put the kibosh on Aztec thoracic surgery. That’s not misguided. That’s evil. Just because he looks like a geography teacher shouldn’t let him off the hook. He is a wicked man busily surrounding himself with wicked (mainly) men and a few wicked women. We should not be afraid to state, plainly and repeatedly, what he is and what he stands for. To do any less is to acquiesce in his vileness.”

So true; we should never ever forget how essentially wicked these people and what they stand for truly are. Upon an honest review of history, their policies have left people not just destitute but have invited the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to march through humanity unabated, leaving massive destruction in their wake. Naomi Klein and her Al-Jazeera loving husband Avi Lewis will never experience the pain their evil ideologies would rain down on people because they’re part of the glitterati, the intellectual class that can jet around the world, making small talk at parties over glasses of champagne and organically sourced appetizers about the evils of capitalism and the desperate need the end to all fossil fuels, all while conveniently ignoring their own personal hypocrisy.

of or relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.

“the disease is localized rather than systemic”

Physiology

denoting the part of the circulatory system concerned with the transportation of oxygen to and carbon dioxide from the body in general, especially as distinct from the pulmonary part concerned with the transportation of oxygen from and carbon dioxide to the lungs.

The use of the word systemic then is meant to imply that it’s pervasive, it’s throughout. And of course the one protester wants to correct Ms. Wynne that it’s systemic black racism. Let’s be clear – there is no such thing in Canada, no such thing in Ontario, no such thing in Toronto. We may have pockets where racial biases exist today, but the implication that racism is pervasive in our country, province and largest, most diverse city is not just a lie, it’s essentially throwing all of us who attempt to conduct ourselves in as much of an non-racist fashion as possible under the bus, not to mention the Toronto police and every other police department in the province that for the most part goes out of its way to conduct outreach to minority communities.

So this is a leader? A leader doesn’t essentially accuse the majority of people in her province of being racist when confronted by a group of nonsensical, noisy, outrage addicts. Here’s what a real leader would have done; invite the “leaders” of this protest into her office for a chat, without cameras (I doubt they would have come then – it’s all about the publicity for them) and tell them, politely, to grow the f*ck up and stop slandering my province and my police. Then kick them out with a smile and a wave for the cameras and ignore them from then on. These people, starved of oxygen, will only flame out. But Wynne has just fanned the flames.

The artist and the fundamentalist arise from societies at differing stages of development. The artist is the advanced model. His culture possesses affluence, stability, enough excess of resource to permit the luxury of self-examination. The artist is grounded in freedom. He is not afraid of it. He is lucky. He was born in the right place. He has a core of self-confidence, of hope for the future. He believes in progress and evolution. His faith is that humankind is advancing, however haltingly and imperfectly, toward a better world. The fundamentalist entertains no such notion. In his view, humanity has fallen from a higher state. The truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx. Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal.

The bolding of words is mine.

So let us consider that very succinct description of fundamentalism in context with the recent John Robson article and the Munk debate from last Friday of which people are shocked that the pro-refugee side actually lost the debate when the audience was polled at the end of the event.

Here’s my thesis; the Islamic world is a failure. Despotic rulers, poverty, backwards misogynist cultures… they’re a failure and have been for quite some time now. They’ve “lost” to the West and modernity. The people in those lands are confused, disheartened, defeated, they don’t know how to deal with this new liberty especially in places like Iraq where it was forced on them because the neo-con arrogance was that people want and embrace freedom. So Muslims come to the West, either physically or metaphorically, looking for rules and guidance on how to navigate the “free” world because they lack the tools for self-regulation, as do great swaths of humanity, even in the West.

But per the Robson article and Charles Murray and others, progressives have been so successful over the past 40 years destroying Western culture and the institutions it was built on that these people come to the West and find nothing, a vacuum. No structure, no rules, no ideas on how to regulate themselves. And so they turn to fundamentalists who tell them this freedom stuff is for the birds, we need to return to a time in history (the Caliphate) when things were known, when faith ruled the day and we were in our glory. And they buy into it – even two or three generations into being Western, because even great swaths of youth in the West are lost in a culture that holds nothing sacred anymore and just looks steady for the next thing to tear down.

Freedom is messy, incoherent and confusing. For the most part, anyone who might read this post is lucky- we’ve been blessed with a good upbringing and rooting in character fundamentals that give us the ability to more or less successfully self-regulate our own behaviours and navigate our free lives. But a great number of people in our own countries and across the planet are not as fortunate, and they have no idea how to deal with their lives. Once upon a time here in the West, we had a dominant culture and traditional institutions that may have helped people get through life, but now those are being laid to waste. And so we offer people who have difficulties nothing. You’re on your own. And that’s why they turn to fundamentalism because there’s answers there.

So, the idea that we should hold out our hands and bring in millions of migrants and refugees into the West is an increasingly absurd proposition in these current times because it is akin to people on a sinking ship volunteering to pull people aboard from a life boat. They may not be jihadists or fundamentalists before they get here, but ironically we’re the ones who’ve made the conditions ripe for them to turn that way once they get here.